Posted tagged ‘Brian Herzog’

Asreported by the Swiss Army Librarian, the Chelmsford Public Library has started a rather ambitious reclassification project. They’re aiming to gradually migrate over to a system that maintains some of the structure of Dewey while becoming more akin to BISAC.

I wish them the best of luck, and they’re in great hands with Brian Herzog, but honestly the system seems a bit of a mess to me. The designers clearly want to move to something a bit more user friendly, a very admirable goal certainly, but they’re still essentially sticking with Dewey’s organization. For example why keep a subject begging to be broken out into it’s own grouping like computers within the general information section it resides in with DDC?

I’ll definitely be keeping up with Brian’s post to see how this project progresses. Again, good luck.

A few weeks back Library Journal published a list of America’s Star Libraries. Amongst the winners were 11 from Massachusetts, and two of my neighboring libraries, Lenox and Stockbridge, so congrats all.

However, Brian Herzog has been looking at the data for these honors and has identified something questionable regarding them. The winning libraries were primarily determined by their usage stats in comparison to their town’s per capita income. Now Brian put two and two together and noticed that nearly all the winning libraries in the state were ones in resort communities, and thus ones with large numbers of seasonal patrons who don’t pay to their town’s tax base.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to many of the libraries that won, and their wonderful across the board. But I’ve got to admit after Brian’s analysis the requirements for winning are a bit suspect.

Brian Herzog (again) has picked up on a fascinating coincidence. Weird Massachusetts is the latest in a series of supernatural travel guides in the Weird U.S. series. One of the interesting things the publisher is doing with these books is pulling photographs that were made available under a Creative Commons License on Flickr. The lucky photographers get a credit and a complementary copy of the book. I actually had a photo under consideration that didn’t make the final cut, but Brian had one that did. But what’s really interesting is that he learned of two other Mass. librarians who got photos in the book as well.

So what’s going on here? Are librarians inherently good photographers? Do we have a higher tendency to travel to places of interest? Are we more likely to contribute to the Creative Commons? Or are we just more advanced Flickr users? I can only speak for myself, but I do use quite a lot of tags and place nearly all of mine on the Google Map Flickr provides, and I wouldn’t be too surprised to learn that a disproportional amount of librarians use the tools similarly.

I’ve picked up a reputation at my library as a Microsoft naysayer, particularly when it comes to Internet Explorer. Between Microsoft’s monopolistic practices with the way they push it and the fact that it doesn’t work with HTML (why aren’t more people bothered by that?) I just hate the thing. Which is why I was so happy to see Brian Herzog’s write up on his library’s total migration to Firefox. And they get bonus points from me for installing the IE tab add-on that lets Firefox behave as if it was IE temporarily so you can still use it with sites designed for its competitor. Well done.